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p Marxist philosophy first made a scientific approach to the study of society. Marxists rejected the idea of studying society in general and concentrated on specific social studies in a given socio-economic formation. As Lenin aptly wrote: “The distinction between the important and the unimportant was replaced by the distinction between the economic structure of society, as the content, and the political and ideological form. The very concept of the economic structure was exactly explained by refuting the views of the earlier economists, who saw laws of nature where there is room only for the laws of a specific, historically defined system of relations of production. The subjectivists’ arguments about ’society’ in general, meaningless arguments that did not go beyond petty-bourgeois Utopias (because even the possibility of generalising the most varied social systems into special types of social organisms was not ascertained), were replaced by an investigation of definite forms of the structure of society. Secondly, the actions of ’living individuals’ within the bounds of each such socio-economic formation, actions infinitely varied and apparently not lending themselves to any systematisation, were generalised and reduced to the actions of groups of individuals differing from each other in the part they played in the system of production relations, in the conditions of production, and, consequently, in their conditions of life, and in the interests determined by these conditions—in a word, to the actions of classes, the struggle between which determined the development of society. This refuted the childishly naive and purely mechanical view of history held 111 by the subjectivists, who contented themselves with the meaningless thesis that history is made by living individuals, and who refused to examine what social conditions determine their actions, and exactly in what way. Subjectivism was replaced by the view that the social process is a process of natural history—a view without which, of course, there could be no social science" [1; 1, 411].

p A scientific definition of “society” is possible only from the standpoint of dialectical materialism. Society is a relatively stable system of social connections and relations of large groups of people, backed by force of law, custom, traditions, etc., formed in historical development, based on a certain mode of production and appearing as a stage in the progressive development of man.

p To understand society in toto, as well as its different elements, one must first examine its basis—the mode oi production, which is an organic unity of the productive forces and production relations. The mode of production serves as a specific historical form of production. It is characterised both by the implements people use to produce the material wealth they need, and by the ownership of the means of production required to produce this wealth.

p Bourgeois sociology considers human consciousness to be an absolute and isolated force, and the only basis of history. Western sociologists sometimes criticise Marxist sociologists for ignoring the role of man and his consciousness in social development and for seeing only the movement of impersonal categories. The criticism is misplaced. Marxist sociology has shown that men are simultaneously authors and actors. Production of material wealth and the elaboration of new technology and implements require the maximum participation of man’s consciousness and will. But production relations cannot be established or changed by human choice because they are determined by objective material factors, primarily the productive forces.

p The forces of production express man’s relationship to nature and represent the degree of his domination over it. They include all active ingredients in the labour process, the labour implements and people with appropriate knowledge and production skills, by virtue of which they carry on production. Human beings are the principal and decisive production force; as producers of material wealth they 112 are the creators of history. Without men technology is a dead force, as Marx made abundantly clear: “A machine which does not serve the purposes of labour is useless. In addition, it falls prey to the destructive influence of natural forces. Iron rusts and wood rots. Yarn with which we neither weave nor knit is cotton waste. Living labour must seize upon these things and rouse them from their deathsleep, change them from mere possible use-values into real and effective ones" [5; I, 183].

p The relations of production form among members of society as they influence and are influenced by nature, because men cannot produce without somehow collaborating in joint activity and mutual exchange.

p Since these relations are formed directly in material production, are determined by its material element—the means of labour—and exist independently of man’s consciousness and will, they are material relations. Their character depends on the ownership of the means of produc tion, i.e., the method by which labour power is combined with the means of production, and, further, by the resultant relations of mutual exchange, relations of distribution of the produced material wealth, production and personal consumption.

p As they represent the most decisive aspect of material production, the relations of production may be of a varied and even mutually exclusive form. Production relations based on capitalist ownership of the means of production, on exploitation of hired propertyless labour and forced thereby to sell their labour power, are called capitalist production relations. Relations based on social ownership of the means of production, co-operation and mutual assistance among workers free from exploitation, are called socialist production relations.

p Further development of the socialist production relations results in communism—“a classless social system with one form of public ownership of the means of production and full social equality of all members of society; under it, the all-round development of people will be accompanied by the growth of the productive forces through continuous progress in science and technology; all sources of public wealth will gush forth abundantly, and the great principle 113 ‘From each according to his ability, to each according Lo /H’.S needs’ will be implemented" [12; 51].

p The main feature of the mode of production is its spontaneous development or self-motion. A change in the mode of production always begins with a change in the productive forces. By participating in production and improving an implement of production, human beings themselves change as a productive force. The result of interaction between the means of labour, technology and the people who set them in motion, is a process of continuous quantitative accumulations within the productive forces, a process leading to their qualitative change. The production relations of men change in accordance with the changes in the productive forces and depend on them.

p Thus, the transition from stone tools to bronze and iron tools, from primitive hunting economy to livestock breeding and agriculture became a prerequisite for a higher productivity of labour. A higher productivity of labour within the family community and the tribe made it possible to produce a surplus product which was accumulated in the hands of a few hereditary aristocrats.

p The basis of production relations in slave-owning society was the slave-owner’s ownership of the means of production and the slave whom the slave-owner could sell, buy and even kill. The new production relations corresponded to a higher level of productive forces than those of the primitive communal system. Agriculture, livestock breeding, handicrafts and the use of metal tools were relatively widespread.

p The slave-owning mode of production, unlike that of the primitive community, signified an increase in the producers of material wealth. It is known, for example, that in the ancient Greek polis the ratio of free men to slaves was 1:10. Moreover, slavery developed an immeasurably more complex division of labour (both between the polis and the provinces, and within the latifundium or shop) than did the confined family community. Water and wind began to be used to supplement human labour power. In the ancient world technical progress led to considerable technical achievements in building, the treatment and storage of grain, manufacture of leather and cloth, etc.

p Slavery was a progressive stage in the history of human 114 society. The productive forces, science and culture developed more rapidly on the basis of slavery, but, having reached a certain level, they could make no further headway within the production relations of slave-owning society.

p The transition to feudalism was not a conscious act by members of society who “suddenly” became aware of the abnormality of slavery. It was a spontaneous process spanning a long period of history, although it was much shorter than the emergence of slavery. To live and develop, society required a type of producer different from the slave, more interested in his work and creating more material wealth. The serf proved to be such a producer.

p The productive forces of feudalism were superior to those of slave-owning society. The methods of smelting and processing iron improved. Iron ploughs and other iron tools began to be used on a large scale. Man began to exploit water power.

p The direct producer, the peasant, was partly liberated. He could still be bought and sold, but no longer killed. The serf now had some interest in his work. This gave him some initiative in work which the slave did not have.

p With the rise of manufacturing the ever-growing contradiction between the new character of the productive forces and the old feudal production relations began to increase. The capitalist entrepreneur united individual producers and by dividing the production process into partial operations, he achieved much higher labour productivity than had the guilds. But this mode of production also required a worker different from the serf. Firstly, he had to be free from feudal or guild dependence so that he might be hired and used by any owner of capital. Secondly, he had to be absolutely free from the means of production, i.e., he had to have no land, draught animals and tools, so that fear of starvation might drive him to work in the factory. This worker had to be a proletarian. The young bourgeoisie drove him into servitude by “bloody legislation”, by the enclosures and other measures of the period of primary capitalist accumulation.

p In the long run the scientific and technical revolution led to the invention of the steam engine and large-scale industrial production—the first industrial revolution. The power of steam and then electricity made it possible to 115 vastly increase society’s productive forces, to replace the petty economy of the town and countryside by large-scale machine production, and to penetrate to the remotest corners of the earth.

p But, after playing a revolutionary role in history, the bourgeoisie shared the fate of its predecessors: it became an outmoded, reactionary force and began to impede social development. The bourgeoisie lent production a social character, yet retained private appropriation. The product of social labour is appropriated by an individual capitalist or a group of capitalists—a monopoly. This basic contradiction in capitalism engenders anarchy of production, cyclical production crises and chronic unemployment, and bitter competition between the capitalist syndicates, which leads to local and world wars.

p The Programme of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union sums this up in the following words: “All in all, capitalism is increasingly impeding the development of the contemporary productive forces. Mankind is entering the period of a great scientific and technical revolution bound up with the conquest of nuclear energy, space exploration, the development of chemistry, automation and other major achievements of science and engineering.... Imperialism is using technical progress chiefly for military purposes. It is turning the achievements of human genius against humanity" [12; 20].

p The conflict between the productive forces and the production relations of modern capitalism shows that the production relations do not automatically follow in the wake of the productive forces. The production relations, as the main motive power in the development of the productive forces may, upon the appearance of a new mode of production, become the main hindrance to the further development of these productive forces. The dependence of the production relations on a specific stage in the development of the productive forces, the dialectics of development of the productive forces and the production relation’;, is a universal sociological law.

p This law also operates under socialism and during the transition to communism. But under socialism the lag of the production relations behind the level of development of the productive forces does not lead to conflict. Socialism creates 116 conditions which make it possible to notice the new objective requirements of economic development and to make changes in the socialist production relations corresponding to the developing productive forces. Under socialism the working people are themselves vitally interested in developing production, and there are no classes which for mercenary interests want to retain the old production relations. At the same time, in expressing the will of the working people, the state, far from counteracting the progressive changes in the production relations in the interests of the working people, on the contrary, does its utmost to bring them about.

p Nor does the higher phase of communist society escape this universal sociological law. The very principle of communism—from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs—implies endless motion not stagnation. Under communism each new epoch will also mean a higher level of development of people’s abilities selflessly given to society, and greater satisfaction of people’s material and cultural needs. Communism offers a vast scope for real social progress leading to unprecedented heights in science, culture and human happiness. Communism means a great development of society where social evolutions will cease to become political revolutions.

p On the basis of society rises a corresponding superstructure—views, ideas, theories, ideological relations and social institutions. These heterogeneous elements have a number of common features, the most important of which is that they all arise on a certain economic basis and are organically connected with it.

p The superstructure actively influences the basis, its institutions (the state with its army, police, prisons, etc., political parties, church, etc.) exercising not only ideological, but also great material power. The economically dominant class uses its power to consolidate the economic relations favouring its interests. By virtue of this there are cases in the history of society when the productive forces have already outgrown the production relations, but the latter are for a certain period retained by the power of the superstructure.

p The monism of the materialist theory of social development is that it establishes connections of all phenomena 117 with production. The material relations are the decisive relations independent of human aims, ideas and conceptions; the material relations condition them. It is social being that determines social consciousness.

p The proposition that the laws of social development are not only independent of man’s consciousness, but themselves play a decisive role in the development of consciousness is an axiom of historical materialism. Marx wrote: “Even when a society has got upon the right track for the discovery of the natural laws of its movement—and it is the ultimate aim of this work, to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society—it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development" [5; I, 10].

p Marxism regards society as a living organism where not fortuitous factors, but functionally dependent elements of a single whole, subordinate to the action of objective laws governing social development, interact. On the basis of this, sociological analysis of the phenomena of social life reveals the social nature of each of them, its place in the system of social relations and its role (function) in historical development.

p Marx applied the materialist principle to the cognition of all social phenomena and thereby created a single scientific theory of social development. He regarded society as the indissoluble unity of the two aspects of social relations—material and ideological—but attached paramount importance to the material, production relations. Proceeding from the materialist principle he gave the only scientific definition of society: “The relations of production in their totality constitute what are called the social relations, society, and, specifically, a society at a definite stage of historical development, a society with a peculiar, distinctive character" [5; 1,90].

p The ancient, feudal, bourgeois and communist societies are such aggregates of production relations; each at the same time marks a special stage in the progressive process of human development. Marx writes: “From my standpoint the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history" [5; I, 10].

p Unlike bourgeois sociology, which denies the objective 118 and regular character of distribution, scientific sociology has established the concept of socio-economic formation and has for the first time in the history of social science provided a criterion which makes it possible to distinguish significant and insignificant phenomena in the complex network of social phenomena. Lenin once wrote that in sociology materialism “provided an absolutely objective criterion by singling out ’production relations’ as the structure of society, and by making it possible to apply to these relations that general scientific criterion of recurrence whose applicability to sociology the subjectivists denied. So long as they confined themselves to ideological social relations (i.e., such as, before taking shape, pass through man’s consciousness) they could not observe recurrence and regularity in the social phenomena of the various countries, and their science was at best only a description of those phenomena, a collection of raw material. The analysis of material social relations (i.e., of those that take shape without passing through man’s consciousness: when exchanging products men enter into production relations without even realising that there is a social relation of production here)—the analysis of material social relations at once made it possible to observe recurrence and regularity and to generalise the systems of the various countries in the single fundamental concept: social formation. It was this generalisation alone that made it possible to proceed from the description of social phenomena (and their evaluation from the standpoint of an ideal) to their strictly scientific analysis, which isolates, let us say by way of example, that which distinguishes one capitalist country from another and investigates that which is common to all of them" [1; 1, 140].

p Scientific Marxism does not assert that economic forces are the only cause of social action and the remainder is but passive effect. Social life is the result of complex interaction of various and unequally significant social forces. The basis of this interaction, however, is the mode of production. Production determines the unity and integrity of history, while its many manifestations are the result of interaction of all aspects of social life.

p Economic relations combine nature, technology and culture in a single social organism. Western sociologists 119 fail to understand this and dismantle these conditions in the life of society into separate elements which they oppose to one another in a metaphysical manner.

p Only the materialist conception of society has cleared the way for a comprehensive study of the social process as a process of emergence and development of socio-economic formations. It examines the total of all contradictory tendencies, reducing them to determinable conditions of life and production of the various social classes. It eliminates subjectivism and arbitrariness in the choice of various “predominant” social ideas, norms or values, and relates them to the state of the material productive forces.

p Lenin criticised the subjective-idealist approach to the social process when he wrote: “The materialist is more consistent than the objectivist, and gives profounder and fuller effect to his objectivism. He does not limit himself to speaking of the necessity of a process, but ascertains exactly what social-economic formation gives the process its content, exactly what class determines this necessity. In the present case, for example, the materialist would not content himself with stating the ’insurmountable historical tendencies’, but would point to the existence of certain classes, which determine the content of the given system and preclude the possibility of any solution except by the action of the producers themselves. On the other hand, materialism includes partisanship, so to speak, and enjoys the direct and open adoption of the standpoint of a definite social group in the assessment of events" [1; 1, 401].

p The materialist approach to history and the consistent application of materialism to social phenomena have eliminated the main deficiencies of pre-Marxist sociology.

p Firstly, from investigating the ideological motives of history Marxist sociologists turned to analysing their social causes, i.e., the objective laws of social relations rooted in economic development, particularly the material productive forces.

p Secondly, from studying the ideological motives of the actions of individuals they turned to investigating the socialpsychological actions of the people, revealing the roots of these actions in the conditions of their material life.

p Thirdly, from individual facts they turned to an allinclusive study of society as an integral social unit.

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Fourthly, i’rom discussing society in general they turned to concrete studies of a given society, a given socio-economic formation as a link in the historical development of human society.